Change in Eastern Europe?

The 2018-19 elections in Russia and Ukraine (1) will change Eastern Europe’s political landscape. That could mean new chances for an end to (or escalation of) the war between Russia-led irregular separatists and Russian regulars, on the one side, and Ukrainian governmental forces (as well as some paramilitary units) in the eastern parts of the Ukrainian Donets Basin, on the other.

In both cases the Russian and Ukrainian political leaders’ behaviour has more to do with internal than foreign factors. But the domestic political implications of the Russia/Ukraine conflict in both countries diverge, contradicting the widespread belief that the two countries’ leaderships of Ukraine are equally big winners of the war on both sides of the ‘contact line’.

Read also Laurent Geslin &
Sébastien Gobert, “Ukraine’s energy dilemma”, Le Monde diplomatique, March 2015.
Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine adventure has been a principal source of his increased popularity. It has even led sociologists to speak of a new ‘Crimea consensus’ in Russian society – a largely manufactured, yet widespread, collective agreement among much of Russia’s population about the justice and legitimacy of Moscow’s territorial, political, cultural and economic claims in regard to Ukraine. Moving the date of the 2018 Russian elections to that of the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Russian-Crimean annexation treaty (18 March), and Putin’s electoral win, show the importance of the aggressive anti-Ukraine campaign to Putin’s support.

This is in contrast to Ukraine, and to the sudden rise of the once secondary Petro Poroshenko in spring 2014 to contender for, then holder of, the first post-Maidan presidency. His unexpected post-revolutionary prominence came from a presumption in large parts of Ukrainian society that the experienced politician and negotiator would be the right choice to bring peace and security, under the difficult conditions of an increasingly aggressive Russia and rapid socio-economic decline of post-Maidan Ukraine.

Initially, the victory of the anti-oligarchic 2014 Revolution of Dignity had pointed to a new political era with statesmen and -women from outside the old oligarchic system. This prospect changed with Russia’s covert military annexation of Crimea and invasion in the Donets Basin or Donbas (2). Under the shock of the loss of territory, escalating war in eastern Ukraine and resulting economic dislocations, the Ukrainians gave their vote to the former minister. Poroshenko had (and still has) the defect of being one of Ukraine’s leading oligarchs but he was, in spring 2014, widely assumed to be able to lead the Ukrainian state out of the deepening crisis in its foreign affairs, and absence of internal cohesion and industrial potential.

The recent drop in Poroshenko’s popularity has more to do with his failures in domestic affairs than his inability to bring peace and re-establish full control over eastern Ukraine (not to mention Crimea). Most Ukrainians criticise his unwillingness to change the country’s oligarchic order – or to fully disengage from his own business interests, in and outside Ukraine. But his political descent is also because of his inability to fulfil the hopes of his 2014 voters – to improve relations with Russia, end the war in the east, and restore the ‘People’s Republics’ in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts to government control. Had Poroshenko delivered on this campaign theme, voters might have partly forgiven him the inconsistencies of his domestic reforms.

Poroshenko was unable to solve the major foreign issue, Ukraine’s bloody confrontation with Russia, and was not willing to push through any real domestic transformation. Now he seems doomed to lose the coming elections. He could even rival the embarrassing record of his former patron Viktor Yushchenko, who lost the 2010 presidential elections coming fifth place with a miserable 5.45% of the vote.

The forecast for 2019 is that the leadership in the Ukrainian executive and legislature could provide an international pretext for – and domestic impulse to – the solution of the Donbass conflict. The hope is that a change in Ukraine’s leadership will, with the accumulating effects of western sanctions against Moscow, lead to a reset in Russian-Ukrainian relations, and motivate Putin at last to decide to pull out from the Donets Basin.

Andreas Umland

Andreas Umland is a DAAD Associate Professor of German and European Studies at the Department of Political Science of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kiev, a member of the Valdai Discussion Club, and general editor of the book series « Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, » Stuttgart. http://ku-eichstaett.academia.edu/AndreasUmland

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(1) Russia’s presidential took place in March 2018; Ukraine will have presidential and parliamentary polls in 2019.

(2) The Donets Basin or Donbas region is named after its small Siverskyy Donets river, and not after the city of Donetsk or the large Russian river Don, as sometimes wrongly assumed in western commentaries.

Andreas Umland is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and editor of the ibidem Press book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society.”